more half baked music speculation
this whole business of the new squarepusher album playing better in alphabetical order has been making me think about the evolution of art from passive to active. like, they say videogames aren't art because they require user input, whereas movies or stories are completely passive on the user's part. but what about music? how important is the
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beck's way into the idea of making albums where the tracks can be arranged and resequenced and shit like that, which i think is kind of a half-ass idea at this point. to do this, all he has to do is make all the tracks on his albums sound like singles with maybe a loose thread connecting them, which makes for a pretty boring album.
but maybe at some point people will find a more clever way to do this. like figure out multiple ways for the tracks to interconnect or tell a story. but that's also kinda lame and basically reminds me of those goosebumps 'choose your own adventure' stories, which, like this musical setup, are lame and novel.
then there's brian eno who i think said that he wants to make music that evolves over time which is pretty cool. like jon's buddha box, which is awesome. but as cool as the buddha box is, i don't really think regular artists should do that with their music. i mean, if one variable is the listener and the other variable is the music, why would you need both variables changing? the music is already evolving in effect as we get older and our perspectives on the music change.
personally, i like and album that is stagnant and unchanging, just like i like my food. stagnant, and unchanging.
but really though, i think musicians who are into this sort of thing either need to retire or shift their priorities. beck is just running out of ideas. and brian eno has already perfected ambient music so he needs a new activity.
music is already dynamic enough. artists just need to focus on the musical composition and focus less on the track listing, and weird evolving sounds, and track editing and all that crap.
if anything, artists should make albums that don't have any tracks and have the songs just flow from one to the next, or even have the lines blurred. all this focusing on the tracks is just making albums singles-oriented.
the artists are just too lazy and/or not creative enough to make a complete statement within an album, so i guess it doesn't matter, they're going to do what they want anyways. sucks for us though when they release an album that is just a bunch of half-baked singles.
p.s. mash-ups are the worst thing to happen to music since new-metal-rap-rock.
p.p.s. i'm still waiting for pitchfork to review the new squarepusher album. i need my opinion validated (or invalidated).
p.p.p.s. the whole track rearranging thing actually works with electronic albums.
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beck's new album, the information: what's the point of rearranging tracks that aren't even that great to begin with? focus on the MUSIC people! THE MUUSSIICC! (using grandpa simpsons voice)
you know what, i don't even care if you make an album of all singles, at least make the singles good. like squarepusher, good singles that if you rearrange in the right way make a better album. at least he accidentally got the formula right.
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the thing with beck doing that is that it destroys the idea of an album as a cohesive piece of work, reducing music to single tracks. but music has existed like that previously, and the rise of the "album" as a concept sort of came out of the beatles (i think) and music getting more pretentious. but i like that.
apparently the tool album lateralus is based on the fibonacci sequence, and so you can listen to it: 1,2,3,5,8,13,4,6,7,9,10,11,12 or 6,7,5,8,4,9,3,10,2,11,1,12,13 or 6,7,5,8,4,9,13,1,12,2,11,3,10. "These arrangements are rumoured by fans to produce different storylines for the album, although the band has said nothing official on the subject." ^wikipedia. that's probably bullshit, but if it's true, does that mean that tool released three albums on one disc?
i've heard some mash-ups that are better than the original songs, but they were rap songs so maybe the nature of rap makes that possible (maybe its just called a remix when its rap? it seemed like a mash-up to me). san francisco is renouned for its mash-ups, at least by the kind of lame-os that care about that.
if the track rearranging thing works for all electronic albums, that means that no electronic artist has created a great album, only a great collection of songs, which i don't think is true. i mean no album is perfect, so theres always going to be a little bit of wiggle room with track sequencing and such....but, for example, i don't think you could randomly rearrange the tracks on the new tim hecker and end up with as good an album. do you think it is more true with electronic music than other forms, and do you think that might be because electronic music is less emotionally varied and therefore less capable of creating a cohesive storyline or emotional journey or whatever bullshit albums achieve?
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